DRIVING back from Tunbridge Wells with a friend, we were startled to be slung off Seal Hollow Road, and kept off it, by police tape at every junction.

Car accident, we speculated? Sudden catastrophic potholes?

The reality, as this journal informed us in its next edition, was much more fascinating: killer trees.

OK, one killer tree. Ominously, though, the report suggested that there might be lots of other big trees in town trembling on the edge of acute arboreal collapse.

After a bit of a giggle at the idea of mass tree failure, I sobered up and noticed that there suddenly seemed to be an awful lot of tree surgery going on. Now, this might be because it's the right time of year to trim a tree to a trunk and two twigs.

Or it might be because all the tree surgeons, having overwintered in the Azores, have rushed back to shave as many trees as possible while the chain-saw season is still with them.

Or might it be because, having smirked a bit at the idea of all our trees falling down, we subliminally took note that the turkey oak was the same height as the distance from its base to the new conservatory?

As I write, both my closest neighbours have got the tree surgeons in.

Since 8am, two chain-saws, a generator and one of those big masher things have been going full-tilt.

The effect is a bit like being trapped in a hangar while they test-fire the engines of a 747.

I'm aware that it's the same all over Sevenoaks. Tree surgeons are everywhere. I think we've got an attack of Chronicle-induced nerves.

I'm not Gertrude Jekyll when it comes to gardens, but I'm reliably informed (by people who can actually keep plants alive) that a traumatised tree may look perfectly OK for years, until one night – usually just after you've got the garden nice and invested in a new larch-lap fence – it gives up the ghost and takes out the magnolia on its way down.

A few years ago, a tree across the road from us did just that, scrupulously missing its owner's MG but flattening the next-door neighbour's garage. The root system, newly exposed, stank. The poor tree had obviously been diseased for years.

But here's the thing; you wouldn't have known it to look at the big leaves and all the growth above ground.

Unless I've missed an important part of alternative medicine, I think there's a gap in the market waiting to be filled. We need Tree Whisperers. People who can peer at leaf-vein patterns and put their ears to a trunk and quietly suggest that you might think about moving the greenhouse and the new azalea bed 20ft to the west.

If we can tell people's health from the bumps on their feet, and get dogs to sniff out cancer, surely we must have a way to tell if the sycamore is sickly and may have to be shuffled off this mortal coil a bit sooner than expected?

I mean, it might be you under the next killer tree on the Seal Hollow Road. Worse, it might be me.